Those errors indicate that either the SFDB service is temporarily unavailable, or that your SpamFilter is unable to reach our SFDB webservice at http://sfdb.logsat.com.

I checked our logs for the SFDB service for yesterday, and did not find any issues (at least not any obvious ones). If you'd like to upload for us your SpamFilter's activity logfile for the day this happened, you can do so here:

https://logsat.com/sfi-upload-box.asp

Please let us also know the external IP address of your SpamFilter server, so we can locate it in our webservice logs and see if we see any problems we may have missed during the superficial look we had earlier.

Yes - they are related. After a few timeouts, SpamFilter will stop trying querying the SFDB webservice so as to not waste any more time while processing new emails. Once a minute or so SpamFilter will poll that webservice on the side to see if it becomes available, and if so, the SFDB tests will resume automatically.

If you'd like to send the logs over we may be able to tell if it was an issue with your internet connection or our own webservices.

No bother at all - we're here to help! The SFDB is usually our most efficient filter, so yes - if it's not working properly that would most likely cause an increase in spam. If you send the logs over I'll review them for ano overall health check as well, to ensure all the major filters are also working and stopping the same % of spam as we'd expect.

As you discovered, I can confirm that neither your SDFB nor your SFDE filters were working at all for the day of the logfile.

The URL used for our proprietary SFDB/SFDE/SFDC filters is http://sfdb.logsat.com. Its IP (66.181.198.110) has not changed in quite a while (years I think), even though we may occasionally temporarily move that website to different servers in the 66.181.198.nnn subnet during server maintenances and updates. The last time this happened was for about 24 hours a couple of weeks ago. As an FYI if you use the antivirus plugin we also just started using Amazon's cloud storage for faster downloads, using the URL http://aws.logsat.com. Being cloud-based, those IPs will change routinely.

AS a side-note, we also finished debugging your logfile, and even without being able to use our most efficient filter (SFDB), SpamFilter seems to be working extremely well.

Let me give you an example. The logfile you forwarded us shows 15,764 connection attempts. Of those connections, SpamFilter accepted and delivered only 700 emails. 255 of these emails were whitelisted, so SpamFilter identified as clean 445 emails out of 15,764. This means that SpamFilter only allowed 2.8% of your total email traffic thru. Not counting the whitelisted emails, SpamFilter thus identified as spam and blocked a whopping 97.2% of your total SMTP traffic.

Now, assuming that one out of three emails you receive in your mailbox is spam (thus 33%), this still means that SpamFilter incorrectly allowed thru 33% x 445 = 148 emails. So SpamFilter would have incorrectly identified as clean only 148 emails out of 15,764. This is an accuracy of 99.1%, which is actually a very very good spam catch ratio.

The log I sent you today was just for today and I had added country and additional domain blocking from last week. Would you like me to upload Thursday's log which would have had more spam make it through to the employees...I will go ahead and upload the log for you...

Received the 2nd log. The stats are indeed a bit worse, so your additional settings appeared to have helped quite a bit. As a reference, these are the stats for you log of the 28th:

70910Total Connections

6986Forwarded

1654Whitelisted

5,332Detected Clean

7.5%% emails allowed

92.5%% emails blocked

33.3%Assume percentage of spam in mailbox

1,776spam emails assuming above percentage in mailbox

2.5%Percentage spam emails missed

97.5%SpamFilter accuracy

and these were instead the ones for your log of the 1st:

15764Total Connections

700Forwarded

255Whitelisted

445Detected Clean

2.8%% emails allowed

97.2%% emails blocked

33.3%Assume percentage of spam in mailbox

148spam emails assuming above percentage in mailbox

0.9%Percentage spam emails missed

99.1%SpamFilter accuracy

note however that the log for the 1st only contained emails from midnight until 6AM, while the one for the 28th had emails for the entire day. This may skew the stats as during working hours more legitimate emails usually comes thru than at night, so the overall percentages of emails allowed and of the accuracy may differ if only considering the interval midnight-6AM (during which there will be less legitimate emails).

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